Jenny Hval Quotes

On an emotional level, I don't want to be a guide. I want people to hear things and experience them their own way.

I got really interested in the language used in blogs written by young girls - a young person's aggression, which is always lacking from the visual world.

I'm obsessed with voices in film. I have this memory of how people say words, even on the most intensely stupid reality TV show.

I remember being very, very aware of gender when I was really young. Not necessarily in a bad way. Maybe it's a little bit because I'm Norwegian and how I've been brought up.

I'm inspired by that rawness in very direct communication. My work is not meant to keep people happy or give them an escape.

I'm not in any way trying to make statements that are not also invaded by emotions and abstract ideas that I don't really understand myself. It's more interesting when I can do that.

I really hated being the Norwegian girl in every single conversation in Australia, so I tried to make my Norwegian-ness invisible, speaking like whoever was around me.

I went through various phases of different accents - I get ridiculously obsessed with different accents, different regional ways of using the voice, different types of singing. It's all tied together. Speaking is a kind of singing, as are crying and laughing.

I've studied film a lot, so I know much more about film than music, but I don't think I could have made films.

I'm very interested in the visual world because I'm also very interested in feminism. I find that the world of watching takes us into the most psychotic state of, like, "You are this one person, but you have to become another person to see these images."

I took interest in Paris Hilton at one point and got fascinated with her voice.

Norway's a very gender-aware country, and we're very liberal. There are lots of women's voices being heard here compared to many other countries.

I couldn't even have a guitar. But I got a three-track recorder that was so small that I could take it with me. Then I started recording and writing properly. I recorded lots of voices, not just my own. I was interested in people speaking and singing English and trying out words.

When you're outside of genre, you can expose more vulnerability.

When I write stuff that's provocative, I want people to think about that, too. I'm in between a pop musician and an artist in that way. I want people to be part of the music as they listen, but I also want them to think: What was that?

I've always been a fan of reading art catalogues from exhibitions, and plays, and I've worked with a surrealist German playwright, Heiner Müller.

I'm not trying to be a solution or create a freer, utopian world. I think my music dreams of it, though.

I've never been good at being nostalgic, and I've never been able to focus on sound without having a voice that's very here-and-now.

I'm always going back and forth between wanting to do stuff that's abstract and stuff that's just telling everybody to listen.

I've always been so interested in the way the body feels when singing or being on stage, or being in the audience for that matter. It doesn't have to be the typical "rock" experience. It can be so much more.